Mind Alive

Philosophy

Hawk highs it on the rise. Hawk circles, looking for prey. The philosopher circles, looking for wisdom. Riding thermals, Hawk ascends in wider sweeps of broadening view. Riding thought, the philosopher ascends in widening sweeps of broader view. Wing cresting, Hawk sees a scampering mouse. Mind cresting, the philosopher spots fleeting ideas. Swiftly diving, Hawk plummets toward lunch. Falling fast, the philosopher descends into truth. Catching and killing, Hawk returns to its nest. The philosopher returns.

For me, philosophy is an activity. Philosophical activity involves a search for truth. Philosophical truth is deeper than truth as an opposite to false, including also the scope and meaning of the truth. In this expanded sense of truth, philosophical activity is the search for the truth of the world and the self.

Philosophical activity can also be described as the formulation of basic questions and attempts to answer those questions. Some of the questions which philosophy has asked are: What is the purpose and destiny of human life? What is truth? What is the nature of being? Is reality essentially unitary or diverse? What is the good? What is right action, or inaction?

Philosophy occurs first in the mind of an individual; it is also sometimes transcribed into words, after which it can become a social activity.

In seeking the truth philosophy needs also look to the truth of its own methods.

Thought is a method of philosophy but we need to say, or at least ask, what thought is. The question of the nature of thought is fundamental. All thinking people have at least a rudimentary and preliminary concept of thought. A little reflection will show that common thought has both unitary and diverse elements.

Thought is diverse as some of the following forms and more. Thought can be a flowing succession of words, feelings and images which are sometimes connected and evolve one out of another but which are also sometimes abrupt with a new idea suddenly diverging the stream of thought into another angle. Streaming thought can be allowed to flow freely or it can be channeled, for a while, by the thinker’s will. For example, one can contemplate a mathematical proof in which certain fairly precise thoughts need to follow or co-occur with one another in a determined sequence.

We could continue to examine the multiplicity of thought but we should also look for the unity of thought. If there was only multiplicity and not unity then thought would be a meaningless word and concept. Thought derives its unity from its underlying root in consciousness; thought is diverse in its forms but rises from the unified sea of individual awareness including the forms which include thought, perception, and feeling or emotion.

In philosophy we ask the question, not cynically as did Pilate, but seriously: What is truth? Some thinkers prefer alternative formulations, such as: What is true? Or: How can we know truth? We can see that different ways of questioning the nature of truth both assume and lead us to different sorts of answers.

Unlike the nature of truth, the nature of being was clearly stated early in the history of philosophy. Parmenides clearly expressed the unity of being in his Poem with its two parts, “The Way of Truth” and “The Way of Being”. Later other philosophers, such as Plato, reintroduced duality for example dividing the world into the imperfect realm of perception and the perfect realm of pure thought or form. In another aspect the question of being opened a search for the material substratum of reality which eventually led to the physicists conceptions of matter, force and mechanics. But I think the question of being needs to be rethought in a fundamental way.

What is the being that Parmenides gives unity to? It is one thing to set forth aspects of being, such as unity, but I believe a question has to be directed towards the intrinsic beingness of being itself. How is it that being is being? Descartes found a cause for being in thought but that still does not indicate what being is, but merely why he believed that it is. This intrinsic nature of being is a robust question; if, for example, we attempt to avoid it by redirecting the question towards the linguistic nature of ‘is’ we are very directly reduced to the question of the intrinsic nature of is, of the isness of is, not how ‘is’ is but what is ‘is’.

At least we know of being that it is. Do we then know of the void that it is not? I have tried to describe the implications of saying yes to that question in “Void”.

The nature of truth, the nature of thought and the nature of being are areas of long investigation in philosophy. There is still extensive work being done on these subjects. However I wish to indicate the necessity for intensive work on them. As well as being true rather than false, philosophical truth also needs the further property of significant meaning. It should matter that philosophical truth is true and that it is known. Philosophical truth would have implications that extend beyond the fact of the truth itself.

From Descartes’ point of view the question of being was at least causally reduced to the being of thought, but what is that thought whose isness is prior to being? We all have a rough and ready idea what thought and thinking are, we know thought perhaps a little more intimately than we know being. But what we really know is the experience of thought, or of thinking. In a deeper sense, we have very little idea of the true nature of thought, at least not in its intrinsic nature of awareness. Even if geometric-psycho-bio-neuro-science should provide us with a complete discursive theory of the structure of thought and awareness, would that really explain the intrinsic essence of consciousness? Perhaps we would be convinced so and that might be right but it also might just be losing the question.

As for truth, it seems to me to be a refinement of the nature of thought, but that makes truth essentially subjective. Is it so? I attempt to give a partial introduction to this problem in my note on the “Objective Subjective”.

As well as satisfying the need for truth, philosophy is fecund in practical value. I believe the most important value of philosophy is the illumination and transcendence which the activity of philosophy brings to the philosopher’s own life, but philosophy also has significant worldly import. Philosophy is a primary source of the sciences. Many branches of science grow from the trunk of philosophy. Although astronomy and mathematics were practical affairs before the advent of philosophy, mathematics became a self generating science when its contents and methods were philosophically examined. Philosophy directly gave birth to physics which in turn gave astronomy its scientific reality. It is not hard to trace the philosophical origins of both the biological and social sciences..

The core questions of philosophy give rise to sciences which partially answer those questions. For example, questioning the purpose and destiny of life can give rise to the question of the structure of life, for which an answer can be begun by looking at the events and experiences which fill much of life. I would like to propose a science of the events of human life which would combine the structure, so far relatively unexamined, of everyday actions and events, with the meaning and depth of those extraordinary events of human life marked by rites of passage to produce a real science of human and social time.

Philosophy is fertile with new sciences. The sciences have multiple roots, including previous sciences, mathematics, technology and natural observation; new sciences arise by combining philosophy with reflection upon experience. Today, for example, philosophy and experience are about to give birth to a new science of the psyche in which the practical experience of everyday consciousness combined with the practical experience of what are called the psychic phenomena will be combined with the philosophy of scientific method and with the developing science of consciousness, to produce a new general science of awareness.

Philosophy is challenged by both the age old questions of thought and life and by new questions arising from new conditions. A prime example concerns computers and especially the Internet. Powerful new tools of thought and communication are present and developing but we need to reflect upon their implications for human life. As a result of such philosophical activity we may better be able to help guide some aspects of these developments into more positive and creative channels than they would evolve into without such examination.

High among the applications of philosophy is the understanding, or at least the examination, of the nature of good, the source of right value and action. It was Plato who formulated the concept that all people seek the good and that the problem for philosophy is to find out what is the good Although there appears to be some circularity in Plato’s thesis, it can be practically useful. Assume that you seek the good, then look at your actions and desires and you will find out what you think the good is. You might then wish to re-examine your image of the good.

Although understanding the good can presumably be a source for right action we should also recall Lao Tsu’s taoist prescription of inaction as the source of good effects.

One of the uses of philosophy is to unravel the knots of personal belief. We are all grown as individuals to have a large collection of presumptions about the nature of things, about life and the world. Normally these presumptions are, if unexamined, mutually inconsistent and confusing. They limit our thoughts, feelings and activities into relatively narrow and not always constructive channels. Philosophy can clarify and harmonize our personal set of thoughts and consequent feelings and thus liberate us for a larger, clearer and more resonant life.

Although the last paragraph illustrates a benefit from doing philosophy, it does not necessarily answer the question of why we undertake the philosophic activity. The motives are personal for each one of us and I can best answer by trying to define my own motives for philosophy. I think the deepest motive for me was and still is that somehow I believe that to understand life is a necessary conjunct to living life. The first specific philosophical question which appeared in my mind was an intense curiosity as to the intrinsic nature of consciousness, of how we, as material entities, could be aware. This problem engrossed my attention during school years at about the age of ten or twelve. Other questions arose later, such as the existence and nature of God, the nature of truth, of mathematics and logic, the nature of being, the nature of the good and right action.

There are other motives for doing philosophy. Some philosophical writers are excellent deep and rich stylists of words and meanings. Reading the original works of the major philosophers is an experience of engaging with subtle and complex minds, minds which are aware of and have reflected on many of the important themes of human life. At this level reading the philosophers is much like reading fine novelists except better because the philosophers do not confuse our time with fiction.

Somewhere along the way I lost my compulsive need for final answers. It has come to be that the progressive search for philosophical enlightenment is itself the sustaining motive for philosophical activity. That is, I no longer expect truth to be a place we arrive at but rather more in the nature of a direction we face. This seems to be a much better position in life, allowing greater contentment and happiness. Philosophy recreates life always fresh and new.

There are many styles of doing philosophy. It would be fairly accurate to say that each philosopher creates his own method. Parmenides received his Poem on Being directly from the Goddess; Plato exposed his and Socrates philosophy through half remembered and half invented dialogues between Socrates and other Athenians and visitors (including Parmenides); Descartes deduced his philosophical position from seemingly irrefutable first principles; Wittgenstein went from rational doubt to intense examination of the actual processes of linguistic communication in action; Heidegger explored the limits of rational discourse about being and becoming.. I try to find any avenue of progress towards deeper philosophic questioning.

Philosophy is initiated by true inward questioning, by questioning that seeks the nature of one’s own situation as it actually is in life and perhaps how to understand it or embrace it more fully or even how to improve it. The basic question of one’s own situation may derive into more specific themes such as the nature of being or of knowledge or of the good. Sometimes, in a particular thought session we enter more directly into thematic thought, which may even relate to more specific subthemes or particular questions. But behind the specific thoughts which may occupy thought at a given time is the deeper questioning.

There are philosophers who derive systems of the world through rationalistic deduction from first principles. In this sense first principle means an idea which is intrinsically true and generative of subsequent ideas and often with the assumption that those subsequent ideas dully canvas the world. I also turn to something like first principles, but in a more restricted sense, so I will call mind fundamental principles. For me a fundamental principle is normative for truth in that the fundamental principle is the most irreducible atom of truth that I can find. I also draw conclusions from fundamental principles but I do not expect such conclusions to give a complete account of the world.

I have investigated two fundamental principles which bear mentioning here, although not the full workout. The first is simple to state: the void does not exist. The second is perhaps more intimate to our personal reality but somewhat slipperier in the grasp: essential knowing is personal awareness; those words say almost nothing but I do work the principle out somewhat.

Philosophy has always been the effort to understand life and being but the actual needs and content of that understanding have changed through the centuries. Such changes have been brought about both because of philosophical progress, of developments in science and society and through the independent divergences of time.

In current time I have questions which arise in my mind and other questions which I intentionally draw forth. Both the old questions of philosophy, of being and of the good, still persist as well as questions more immediate to present circumstances.

Here in life, in this life, now; what would understanding be, of this life now and how to live it? This life now is barely spoken of, at least in the context of philosophy; what is it that we do now? How do we pass our time? What are the circumstances of our being? What are we becoming? What should we do? What should we become?

To take one example, social humanity has been acquiring genetic knowledge and technology; at the writing present, in 1997, it is possible to clone mammals and to genetically engineer, at the gene splicing level, useful plants and bacteria; genetic cures for certain human diseases are in the testing stage. If we look a little toward the future we can readily foresee the possibility creative genetic control of human development; the technical possibility appears almost inevitable. How are we to respond to these new possibilities? What understandings are important in order to do so well?

But the above example is still a little distant from the actual living time of most of us humans now. What is our actual life now and what should it be? The answer to the question what is our life now is the province of the sociologist or the contemporary historian. As philosopher I am more limited to that with which I am most familiar, which is primarily, although not exclusively, what is my life now?

Outside my window Jupiter and the gibbous moon are in conjunction, just enfolded by the cloud remnants of a thunderstorm. They are separated by a little over one degree. The clouds have since covered Jupiter but are too thin, in part, to obscure the moon. According to the clock on the computer on which I am typing these words, the time is 9:30 PM, September 13, 1997. I am located in the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, USA (North America, Terra, Sol, Orion Arm, Milky Way, Local Cluster, Virgo Supercluster). I am keyboarding this on a machine which is classified as a PC Pentium-133(megahertz), an average machine for this time, slightly out of date but not useless. I am classified as 53 years (revolutions of Terra about Sol) of age since birth, male, 5 feet and 11 inches in height, 175 pounds in weight, about average for my time and place. In this era some of us read books, which are linearly connected sheets of paper with writing on them, usually structured by the intent of a single individual called an ‘author’. I have recently been reading a book called ‘Metaphysics’ by the author ‘Aristotle’, who wrote this book about 2300 years ago (in past time).

This is the time in which the World Wide Web is growing after its initial fanfare to be whatever it will be. It has recently, the last few years, felt like a cusp of time; now the moon is obscured by slightly lightened clouds.

As I look at philosophical questions, those questions which are authentic to me, over time, as years pass, the same questions keep before my wonder but the relative importance of the questions, or perhaps I should say the relative weights, changes with my evolving perspective of time. First and for a long time and reoccurring was the question of the origins, and secondarily of the structure, of consciousness, then the question of the nature being and eventually of the relationship of being to nonbeing long hovered near the center of my thoughts; now in more recent years and perhaps still growing closer remains the question: How should we live? Rarely have any one of these questions had sole occupancy of my attention to the exclusion of the others but it has been and is more as if one of these questions provided and provides a basic stance from which itself and the other questions are asked. The natures of being and consciousness are still of critical importance to me but much of their importance now resides in the information they can provide for relieving the question of how to live. This paragraph has been true on average and partly, when I was just under half of my present age I was endowed with focus as regards the way of living, of living in time and living in action, and I both devised and practiced certain theories of action which did indeed, unless it was just a natural consequence of youth, seem to provide me with a key to unlock the gate of active being and directed change. But then in the next succeeding years I returned to devising a mathematical theory of consciousness based on graph connectivity of synaptic connectivity in units of action. And it is that way now, searching for being, I find awareness; wanting to know how to live, the answers are too abstract unless they be based they be based upon the actual substance, stuff and facts of living both within and outside of time.

Three quarters, less two weeks, of the year 1997 have passed. In the crudest sense, the first quarter of the year for me was taken up by a study of the computer programming language called ‘Java’; the second quarter was somewhat diffuse, call it mixed media; this third quarter has been focused on writing a philosophical text called ‘Awareness’. During this year I have also traveled more than has of recent years been usual for me. In March I drove my wife, Carol and son, Kent, south, several hundred miles from our home in Fort Collins in Northernmost Colorado, to visit the archaeological preserves of Northern New Mexico, culminating at Casa Bonita. Then in July I drove Carol to Wichita, Kansas, a distance of 600 miles from Fort Collins, for her to paint aura portraits at a weekend psychic fair. In August I drove Kent and my niece, Miranda, to Seattle Washington, 1300 miles from Fort Collins, to return Miranda to my brother, Doug's, house; we also drove on to spend a sunny afternoon at Ruby Beach on the Pacific coast of Washington; it was a long drive home. Yesterday Carol and I went with Kent's school class on a walk above timberline, around 4000 meters above sea level, on Mummy mountain, a more normal Colorado activity.

How does it come to pass that we sit on our back porch and watch the rising September moon where first its fullness is both dimmed and thereby clarified by thin clouds of evening light and then grows too brilliant for clarity as it rises into the darkening night, when another time a few hours distant is filled with the attention of driving along rutted dirt road for miles on old tires above a quick drop off sometimes a thousand feet or more and a time between is for rinsing dishes and placing them in the dishwasher and other times between are for reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics and wondering again about his fairness to his predecessors? While each action and event has its own significance also each pair of events forms an interval of time during which other events occur. But this fact quickly reaches from trivial to profound when we ask and examine not only what events do actually occur in such intervals but also what events can occur and what events should occur during those same intervals and then again when we ask how we could go about inducing those events which should occur to actually occur. But then an entirely different, although complementary, point of view asks or tells how we should conduct our personal being during the occurrence of such events as do happen, whether they so happen by means of our will and action or otherwise. The current actualities of writing and of reading these words form easily distinguishable classes of events.

In Aristotelian terms, with awareness as a fundamental essence, we could use a term for the genus and species of phenomena of which the content of awareness is composed. For the genus I propose the name ‘media’ and a partial list of such media would include vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, memory, language, thought, logic, reflection, emotion, will, dream... The content of awareness may be roughly classified by through these media; it is essentially empirical to do so, more a matter of psychology than philosophy. One of the media, however, is thought, or may be called thought. Thought has some substance or form to it which transcends the empirical and psychological, which reaches to the metaphysical and philosophic.

Thought is part of awareness and thought utilizes the other media of awareness. From a philosophic point of view, thought is a preferred, an excerpted, a noticed and a somewhat but not entirely arbitrarily defined media. Thought is distinguished among the media of awareness by intentionality, which is more explicitly defined as the will to give direction, direction to awareness, direction through the flux of awareness, direction and sequence to the objects of awareness.

The philosophic essence is to write the truth. The truth is something the writing philosopher knows, or should know, and the depth, integrity and value of the philosophy written depends upon the verity, upon which in turn depends the purity of the writing.

We have in English a family of ontological words including ‘be’, ‘being’, ‘become’, ‘becoming’, ‘is’, ‘am’, and ‘are’. In normal usage they are clear and distinct: “That is a horse.” and “He is a horse’s ---.” are simple clear sentences where the ontological verb serves as a pointer towards the object. In some cases we have a claim of equivalence rather than pointing, with additional ontological terms such as ‘equals’ and ‘=’. Usage of such words and symbols opens the doors of metaphysics when ontological verbs are used without objects, such as in the sentences: “Being is.” and “I am.” In these cases the verb points at emptiness, at the void. What is meant by the sentences is unclear, perhaps nothing, perhaps a question, an implied, indefinite question for which metaphysics is the search for an answer.

Thought is an aspect of consciousness, but is not the whole of consciousness. Direct perceptions, emotions, and dreams all escape the boundaries of thought, yet they are part of consciousness, of awareness, of direct personal experience. I include this broader realm of experience described in the last sentence as the matter of the objective subjective. Everything that you, the individual reader, or I, ever perceives, thinks, feels, remembers, dreams, wills, or subconsciously endures, is part of the objective subjective.

And yet those categories of experience may be only the surface of the actual reality of personal experience and of the self. There is also postulated to be a subconscious, not directly known by our waking mind but operating in semisecret to influence the emotions and thoughts we own. There may be also other categories of personal being, angelic, oceanic, totemic, dark, light and extended.

This variety and depth of actual and potential personal experience limits the acuity with which the objective subjective may be defined. We cannot define it entirely by categories of perception, because these categories may connect beyond the personal in unperceivable ways.

Therefore we are left with the rougher stone of the actual language, of what words expressed mean to the perceiver, of what we can build with real words in real language. We might call the objective subjective the largest realm of consciousness experienced by the perceiver. We might call the objective subjective to be the largest realm of experience, even if larger than consciousness, experienced, or effected through, the perceiver.

The actual relationship between philosophy and writing is a matter of contemporary concern; we can only examine a simple aspect of the question here. What we can say is that written philosophy is a sequence of words, sentences and paragraphs, as well as sometimes higher forms of organization, which expresses philosophical ideas.

It is curious to review philosophy with the questioning attitude that philosophy uses to examine other aspects of reality. What can be the point of philosophy? What can be its goals? What is philosophy?

When I do philosophy I am either thinking or writing or both. Sometimes I think without writing and sometimes I think also as I write and sometimes when I am writing the words seem to flow almost before the thought. When I am thinking without writing I think one thought and then another but I make some attempt to control the succession of thoughts and it is that attempt combined with what the thoughts are that make the thinking philosophy. If the thoughts are philosophical then I am thinking about philosophy and if the attempt is to progress in the development of philosophical thought then the thinking is philosophy.

Philosophy derives from the common ground of being and hence shares the common experience. Philosophy is written in language by us who think it. Whatever thought castles we may build in the abstract sky are necessarily constructed using the bricks of natural thoughts and words. We begin with ordinary language and thought which is necessarily inexact. We then refine discursively our thought, gradually drawing our ideas into focus and making our thoughts sharp and exact. This is not necessarily the procedure of philosophical thought at the personal and inner level which may be abrupt and otherwise obscurely rise into clarity and being but it is the proper mode of expression for such philosophical thought. Inner thought also has broad and discursive origins in time, learning, and experience from which philosophical ideas are eventually found and focused. The written expression is like a mirror of the inner thought but does not give an exact likeness of it, rather the reflection in expression attempts and should attempt to build a convincing and clarifying image of the ideas and their origins. Perhaps instead of a mirror reflecting the ideas it would be better to use the image of a lens through which the ideas are gradually brought into focus.

In terms of thinking a goal of philosophy is to think good thoughts; a corresponding goal for written philosophy would be to allow the reader an occasion to think good thoughts. Good is used here as an undefined primitive which might mean true or constructive or something else but primarily means good. Thinking philosophy is a guided succession of thoughts, such guidance being an attempt to find good thoughts. One criterion for philosophical thinking is that the succession of thoughts should approach truth. Truth is as difficult to define as good. One aspect of truth is that it not be false but philosophical truth should also have significance, it should concern the broad themes of life and thought.

If philosophy in the mind is a sequence of thoughts, albeit guided and organized thoughts, then the question arises as to what written philosophy is. The simplest, although not the truest, answer would be to write that written philosophy is a transcription of the verbal content of the sequence of thoughts in the mind. Certainly simple but inaccurate for several reasons: the thoughts of the mental sequence are neither restrictively verbal, also including emotion and sensible imaginings, nor are they always formulated into the correct sentence form of written language; the sequence of thoughts in the mind is not always linearly sequential, does not always follow the most logical steps with which the thoughts could be organized in written form and may also include gaps in the philosophical sequence when the thinker's mind wanders for a time along other avenues; in addition the writing itself, the process of creative writing, gives abode to some expressions of ideas which were not previously thought sequenced in private reflection but appear in the encounter between the philosopher and writing language.

When we write down these words what we do is different from thinking the thoughts which led to them and reading the words is also different. Thoughts fossilize when they are written down but something analogous also happens when the thoughts are thought. Thoughts thought in time differ from the impulse of living mind which generated those thoughts. The reader is a fossil hunter who digs up words, the bones of thought, and excavates meaning for those words, not necessarily meanings which the author intended, but some meanings which are a complex shadowing of the author's intent and the reader's reality.

If philosophy contains sequences of thoughts in mind and sequences of words and higher expressions in writing then the significant questions are which thoughts and which expressions should be. One clue is given by the words used, whether in mind or writing; there are a set of words which are commonly the concern of philosophy; this set might include: being, truth, knowing, thought and others. No such list could be either complete or exclusive but it is a useful point to notice. Another requirement for philosophy is a gate, a door, a filter or a rule to determine which thoughts or expressions fit into the philosophical sequence and which are to be excluded; as I was thinking the sequence of thoughts which provided the origin of this writing here I thought of a counterexample for the rule to exclude: needing new tires for my automobile, which would fit into the sequence as a counterexample but not as a thought of its own value. The exclusionary aspect of the rule is simple but the other side, the determination of which thoughts to think or which expressions to write, that of course is the true significance and also the hard part.

Here is the picture of reality I have now. There are aware entities called people, also perhaps including animals. Each of these entities is entirely surrounded by a shell of awareness; in fact, this awareness is what their existence, their being, consists of. Each aware entity also inhabits just one of these shells, their own, their own self, and no other. Each entity can only encounter this shell and not at all anything beyond. This is logically necessary due to the way, the inclusive way, I have described awareness. Each entity, however, is aware of two different forms of exteriority. One form is the set of other people; the other form is everything else, which might be called nature: matter, time, space, etc. An aware entity may project that other people have some degree of similarity to the self, although the degree and nature of the similarity is uncertain. That other exteriority, nature, is deeply unknown in its intrinsic being, if it has intrinsic being; only the shell of awareness can be known. For each entity there are two wills. One is the self will projected from unknown sources within the self. The other will is other, as if coming from outside of and impinging upon the individual's awareness. Again, this other will can be divided into two classes: that which arises from other people and that which arises from the unknown.

If I watch the lake shore and the water, the water and the beach form a reality in my experience. This awareness exists. What if I were not here, not in existence? That reality would not exist. Would the lake and the beach exist? Whatever might be there, it would not the lake and the beach I see, certainly not from the points of view of physics, physiology and psychophysics. And not existentially. Whatever might be there, if there were no observers, or even the substance which might be related to my personal nonobservation, would at most be a smudgy thing, formless and indefinite, like an uncollapsed wave function. It would be much the same as nothing.

It is an old custom to distinguish being and becoming. Parmenides introduced pure being, unique, whole and timeless. For Heraclitus, becoming, the changing flux, was at least predominant over being. Awareness contains both being and becoming, still being, fixed in a central essence, and the open change of becoming, fluxing in time.

I draw a distinction between existence and being. It is somewhat arbitrary as to which word is used for which meaning, but the two meanings seem to me to have a significant difference. Being is that which is. As for existence, imagine that the primary substance of the world was matter (mass and energy), and that this matter existed in its own substantiality, all of its own, without needing to be known. That would be an example of what I call existence.

Existence is the impossible abstraction of that which is self existence, self subsisting, independently of any observation or being part of any awareness.

Void is a name for that which is not. Also impossible.

Being is real, the content of awareness. At its limits, such being a construct of awareness, approaches, or rather combines, or rather is intellectually bifurcated as two things called existence and the void.

Given language, existence and void are useful, giving being to certain ideas, themselves useful in the game of being.

Frederick Joseph Staley

1997